Against the Machine Quotes

“For now, the useful work seems to be that outlined by Joseph Campbell: ‘to conquer death by birth’. Simone Weil concluded her study of the rootless West by suggesting that the best response for we who find ourselves living in it is ‘the growing of roots’—the name she gave to the final section of her work. Pull up some of the exhausted old plants if you need to—carefully, now—but if you don’t have some new seed to grow in the bare soil, if you don’t tend it and weed it with love, if you don’t fertilise it and water it and help it grow: well, then your ground will not produce anything good for you. It will choke up with a chaos of thistles and weeds. This, in practical terms is, the slow, necessary, sometimes boring work to which I suspect people in our place and time are being called: to build new things, out on the margins. Not to exhaust our souls engaging in a daily war for or against a ‘West’ that is already gone, but to prepare the seedbed for what might, one day long after us, become the basis of a new culture. To go looking for truth. To light particular little fires—fires fuelled by the eternal things, the great and unchanging truths—and tend their sparks as best we can. To prepare the ground with love for a resurrection of the small, the real and the true. But first, we are going to have to be crucified.”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

“By basing their new version of the faith on the notion of sola scriptura—that there should be no authority but the Bible—they unleashed the radical individualism on which the modern world would be built. With tradition and authority demolished, reason would become the only ‘basis for argument about God, creation and morality’.”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

“Sometimes I lie awake at night, or I wander in the field behind my house, or I walk down the street in our local town and think I can see it all around me: the Grid. The veins and sinews of the Machine that surrounds us and pins us and provides for us and defines us now. I imagine a kind of network of shining lines in the air, glowing like a dewed spiderweb in the morning sun. I imagine the cables and the satellite links, the films and the words and the records and the opinions, the nodes and the data centres that track and record the details of my life. I imagine the mesh created by the bank transactions and the shopping trips, the passport applications and the text messages sent. I see this thing, whatever it is, being constructed, or constructing itself around me, I see it rising and tightening its grip, and I see that none of us can stop it from evolving into whatever it is becoming. I see the Machine, humming gently to itself as it binds us with its offerings, as it dangles its promises before us and slowly, slowly, slowly reels us in. I think of the part of it we interact with daily, the glowing white interface through which we volunteer every detail of our lives in exchange for information or pleasure or stories told by global entertainment corporations who commodify our culture and sell it back to us. I think of the words we use to describe this interface, which we carry with us in our pockets wherever we go, as we are tracked down every street and into every forest that remains: the web; the net. I think: These are things designed to trap prey.”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

“In recent times it has been fashionable to talk of the levelling of nations”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

“they are something else: a body. A body whose mind is in the process of developing; a body beginning to come to life.”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

“Some people think they know the answer. Transhumanist Martine Rothblatt’s new religion”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

“that the sacred and the digital not only don’t mix”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

“The crisis of the modern world is not a crisis of technology or politics or greenhouse gases. It is a spiritual war. What the Machine represents is our ultimate rebellion against nature: against reality itself. We have seen this rebellion before. Now our culture’s rejection of its spiritual core has opened us up to powers and principalities that we have no idea how to manage”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

“You will be like gods”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

“The Age of Aquarius slides smoothly into the age of transhumanism as we seek”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

“The god of the self and his faithful servant”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

“That an entire month dedicated to celebrating the ‘queering’ of everything previously ‘normative’ is named after the greatest sin in the Christian world might have brought a grim smile to Seraphim Rose’s face”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

“If the self is our object of worship and science our new priesthood”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

“Like Narcissus”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

“If every society has a spiritual substructure”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

“sacrilegious treatment of a sacred world.”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

“societies built around a notion of the sacred have an immunity to the gravity of the purely material.”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

“Western Christianity progressively abandoned its commitment to transcendence and was ‘resolved into philosophy’, allowing itself to be brought down to Earth, into the realm of social activism, politics and ideas. The conversion of a large part of the religious world to the idea of modernity, said Del Noce, ‘accelerated the process of disintegration’ that the modern revolution had unleashed.[8]”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

“The spiritual power that in the Middle Ages had been exercised by the Church…today can be exercised only by science’,[”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

“Transcendence within the world’ can also be translated as ‘Progress’.”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

“They hang the man and flog the woman Who steals the goose from off the common Yet leave the greater villain loose That steals the common from the goose”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

“Taking away peoples’ ‘comfortable…partial independence’ and substituting it with ‘the precarious condition of mere hirelings’ has been the working basis of Machine capitalism worldwide since the 1700s.”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

“What is it, asks Del Noce, that ‘is no longer possible’? The answer ‘is simple: what is excluded is the “supernatural,” religious transcendence….”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

“By sweeping away old ways of thinking, seeing and living, modernity has produced ‘a type of violence capable of breaking the continuum of history.’[3]”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

“Dis-integration is the tenor of the times.”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

“If the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century represented the replacement of human muscle by machinery”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

“It seems likely that within a decade or so there will be no part of the coast where it will be possible to stare out to sea and not see an industrial skyline”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

“When I visited London recently”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

“Now we spend”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

“We want to go home again”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity